


Sad Girl Hour

by Bawgdan



Series: Alley Cat Gossip [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Drama, Drug Use, F/M, Romance, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:07:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26832673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bawgdan/pseuds/Bawgdan
Summary: Orihime would be much happier if she knew how to ask for the thing she wants. She ought to be exhausted using her virginity as a personality trait.
Relationships: Inoue Orihime/Kurosaki Ichigo
Series: Alley Cat Gossip [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2055135
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	1. post-stupid

_**“The trouble with any salvation usually is that it's not at all funny.” ~ Eve Babitz** _

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Tatsuki isn't taking her seriously. She swears that Orihime hasn't done a serious thing in a very long time. The last serious thing Orihime has accomplished is getting accepted into a good college.

Orihime just can't land a perfect angle in the natural light of her bedroom today. Her face turns out too puffy on camera. Her armpits don't look flattering from a downward angle as she attempts an up-skirt shot of her heart shaped butt. Taking a picture head on, facing the tiny dot of the lens feels sociopathic (and she is most definitely not a sociopath). 

Tatsuki taps away on her Nintendo Switch, sprawled in the middle of Orihime’s bed. Her head propped on the massive stomach of a teddy bear, chin buried in her oversized sweatshirt. 

"I look fat." Orihime flops in her pink desk chair. She states this very pointedly to get a reaction out of Tatsuki. The wheels squeak as she rolls towards the bed. 

"Didn't Narcissus fall into the lake trying to kiss his own reflection? He drowned right...?" Tatsuki shoots a quick glance over her Switch. 

"I'm not a narcissist! And no he starved to death!" Orihime whines out, sinking into her chair, knees jutting out. She holds up her phone and snaps another gross picture of her chin rolls and cleavage and armpit fat. The first thing Orihime notices on other women are the deep arches of their armpits. It's the most fixated she's ever been on a body part. Tatsuki has enviable armpits, free of lumps and rolls, despite the fact that she rarely shaves.

"My boobs are bigger than my head." Orihime stares at the unflattering picture she snapped. She immediately drops the picture in their group chat with Chizuru. Chizuru never has a bad thing to say about Orihime. She stands up and attempts one last round. Her white dress is too pretty to not show on Instagram. It goes with her soft baby-girl aesthetic. Whites and pale pinks. Her manicures and lipsticks are never darker than her nipples. Tatsuki called her 'look' (aesthetic is clearly for serious things), softcore daddy issues porn. Orihime had proclaimed herself a feminist and that her relationship with five hundred thousand people on the internet is how she asserts her feminine power.

"Could you please just take two for me?" Orihime crawls into bed beside Tatsuki, shoving their cheeks together. Orihime pinches Tatsuki's left ear lobe.

Just two actually means two thousand of the same kitten pout. Tatsuki never says no even though she is very tired and so over watching her friend twist her body into painful positions for five hundred thousand strangers. Tatsuki rolls her eyes. Of course she will happily take the same photo over and over and over again for her best friend.

The body can contort itself into many shapes. Posing for a selfie should be an Olympic sport.

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Orihime has always been likable, conventionally attractive, humble, and for the most part a good girl. Her perverse relationship with social media wasn't born out of disharmony with herself. Tatsuki's very wrong opinion is that Orihime's need to take pictures of herself is a symptom of her sexual repression—that the good girl schtick has had a negative effect on her virgin psyche. Orihime doesn't masturbate. Penises look funny. The thought of anything penetrating her is absolutely repulsive. You wouldn't guess this scrolling through her selfies.

The truth is much more shameful than wanting to perform intimate availability to make up for her incapability of it. Orihime feels gooey sentiment. She always cries when the Titanic sinks into the ocean at the end of the movie. Orihime wants romance. Her posturing on social media is a gesture for one person. She wants to fill up Ichigo's feed in hopes to become his muse. Five hundred thousand people that aren't Ichigo just so happen to like her pictures. Her influencer status is completely accidental. Now the hole is too deep to climb out of it. She doesn't have to get a 'real' job. Tatsuki suspects it has murdered her imagination. 

She sits between a terribly drunk Tatsuki and Keigo. Uryuu and Ichigo sit across from them, also a bit drunk but not obnoxiously wasted. Chad is late which makes Orihime the only sober person at the table and the least talkative. Being around Ichigo used to open her up but she has deduced that maybe she's been too much throughout high school. She figures that if she lessens herself in person that it will balance out the too muchness of her social media presence. 

"Don't you guys get sick of doing this every weekend?" Ichigo hasn't touched another beer. Keigo pauses with his mouth around his bottle, pretends to think by tilting his head.

"I feel peer pressure. That's my excuse. I would prefer going to look at something nice instead." Uryuu vindicates Ichigo. 

"You mean like go to fancy museums and drink wine from tea cups with our pinkies out." Keigo wiggles his pinky in the air.

"That's not how you drink wine." Tatsuki snorts, also wiggling her pinky finger away from her beer.

"You come from money, Ishida. Just buy us all plane tickets to Paris. Teach us uncultured swines a thing or two about je ne sais quoi..." Keigo inflects his voice with a cynical sweetness. 

Everyone laughs but Uryuu and Orihime who can't help but scroll through various apps on her phone. She is less enthusiastic about her crush on Ichigo. Especially since it hasn't gone anywhere. It hasn't shrunk in size nor grown. It just sits in her stomach like hunger that no amount of water can soothe. As an adult it is embarrassing to want to drag her tongue down the bridge of his nose. 

"Like you two are creative enough to think of anything better to do." Uryuu folds his arms on the table and frowns.

"I have an idea." Keigo smacks his lips.

There's a collective sigh, except from Orihime. Tatsuki takes her phone out of her hands and shoves it in her purse. Now they aren't the kind of friends that go to clubs high off their asses. Orihime is always on the straight and narrow. But it doesn't keep Keigo from suggesting that they take some funny shaped pill. 

"What do you want to do, Orihime?" Ichigo does the bare minimum and it still makes her blush. She doesn't know what to do with her fingers without her phone.

"I want everyone to be happy." She taps her long nails on the table. 

"Fair enough." Keigo pulls a clear bag out of his back pocket. Inside are ecstasy pills shaped like Optimus Prime's head.

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Everyone, except Orihime, swallows a pill. Chad is a no show (they suspect he has a secret girlfriend) so they all decide to roam around the city like stray cats. Orihime watches the back of Ichigo's neck. Somehow, she always ends up behind him. She is very familiar with his back. He runs his fingers through his scalp. When he lifts his arms, Orihime gets a peek of the dimples over his butt. Her attraction so acute, she feels a sting up her nose like she's about to suffer a powerful nosebleed.

"It's like there's invisible fingers running through my hair. Tiny baby fingers." He says to Keigo and Tatsuki. The blood never comes. Orihime relaxes. Uryuu has fallen behind, his footsteps in tandem with Orihime's.

"You got what you wanted." He startles her with his voice.

"What do you mean?" Orihime has been told by Tatsuki that her disgusting crush has a blunt presence of its own. A fat ghost that wedges itself between her and whoever stands between she and Ichigo. She rubs her cheeks.

"Everyone is happy." Uryuu sweats through his nice shirt. Everyone is sweaty. Orihime is kind of cold. 

"I'm not happy, but I'm not sad." She clasps the top buttons of her sweater.

"What's wrong?" Uryuu's bangs stick to his forehead. 

Orihime isn't the best with words. It's not that she isn't smart. Somewhere along the way (loss could be the culprit) she was stunted. Her vocabulary stopped growing with her feelings. What's the point in talking about things you can't readily solve? Who wants to talk about how sad they are all the time? She wants Ichigo to make love to her like they do in the movies. That's exactly what the fuck is wrong.

"I'm just tired of all this walking in circles." Orihime smiles at Uryuu.

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	2. a crumb of sanity

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The paranormal power of Karakura is that no one ever leaves. A select few do, mostly within the elite circles but they always come back. Karakura has everything anyone could want, no matter the age—the saying goes _we've got everything but Disney World_. 

There's a four year college. A junior college. A trade school. A proper wage gap. Bars. A healthy sized mall. A farmer's market, big business, small business, and everything else that makes a suburb a small town.

Uryuu is confident that he's the only person who thinks _this_ deeply about the mysticism of Karakura. He could've gone to a big school and put miles between him and his father, but when it came time to fill out the applications he was overwhelmed with this sense of dread.

Perhaps it is his privilege that allows him the means of an escape, informing his perspective. His friends hardly mention leaving. Not even Orihime with her top scores wanted to leave. And if they do talk about dipping, it's always temporary, within the reasoning of a vacation (that they really can't afford but they dream).

Kids born into wealth have bull stubborn optimism. _I can do all those things yet I possess no desire_ . Uryuu's father regarded him with mild disappointment. The stipulation of his luxury apartment and allowance was that he enrolled into the university. _Fair enough_.

Uryuu didn't realize that not paying his own rent and driving a nice car would make him a spectacle amongst his friend group. None of them could fathom that kind of financial freedom.

He wipes the sweat from his brow with his right hand and digs through the change in his pockets for the keys to his door with his left. Sometimes when he does ecstasy, it feels like his heart is going to explode in his chest. His guts twist. His mouth gets dry. It leaves him feeling very ugly and fleshy like a scab. When he actually makes it inside of his apartment, he lays on the kitchen floor, riding out the panic attack in the darkness. His heart is fluttering every now and again.

Uryuu is ambivalent about party drugs. It isn't so much that he cares about looking lame, he just wants to feel better connected to his less advantaged friends. Which is shallow, sort of gross, he is keenly aware. They don't actually care about his pedigree, but it is a source of insecurity. Keigo made fun of him for not knowing what souse is. 

As he sweats on the cold kitchen floor, he opens up his phone. He scrolls through Reddit, then Twitter, landing on Instagram. He doesn't use it a lot but ecstasy makes stupid things enormously entertaining.

Orihime is at the top of his feed, pouting in a pair of pink cat eared headsets. The caption reads: **Solo queue ranked games UWU heart emoji**...

She teases with the tip of her tongue touching her cupid's bow. Her cleavage pressed together so, that it takes him a second to realize it is the same top she'd been wearing all night.

Now, it isn't a secret that Orihime's sexual orientation is Ichigo Kurosaki. The joke is that she is saving herself for him—however long that could be. Uryuu has talked extensively with Ichigo about this, and he suspects a very very long ass time. Orihime is beautiful, to a sickening degree. If Ichigo doesn't want it now, it's likely he won't ever want it. Men just know these kinds of things. For this, Uryuu is jealous. The drug enhances this mood.

Uryuu asked Ichigo _what gives?_

Ichigo said that he just knows that Orihime isn't his soul mate. Uryuu was shocked he even believed in _that_. He thought that kind of wishful thinking was reserved for the overtly privileged. 

_"You know how the body won't allow you to suffocate yourself. That's how certain I am."_ Ichigo wasn't looking at him directly when he expressed this sentiment. That was in January. A while ago.

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Orihime sits at her computer, working her way through the middle of a bucket of ice cream. Her goal is to make Platinum II in League of Legends. After losing her first ranked game, this superficial goal seems farther. A bubble appears on her screen—Uryuu invited her to a game.

"Ishida!" She sings into their voice chat.

"Why are you still awake?" His voice is husky like he has a dry throat.

"I could ask you the same." Orihime snorts, adjusting her headsets.

"You didn't do any drugs," Uryuu counters.

"I just don't sleep much these days." Social media has fried the wiring of her brain. Her joy receptors don't function normally anymore. Orihime doesn't sleep at all. She is addicted to refreshing her Instagram and Twitter feeds. She watches reels of Ichigo playing his guitar, more than twenty times. When the dopamine doesn't hit, she rereads all of her comments until she feels gooey with confidence, curling up into a fetal position sliding her free hand between her warm thighs.

She's trapped in this cycle of self-hatred, carrying along an embryonic sexual desire to be wanted. And it all feels fruitless when she isn't staring at her phone. 

"Do you want me to start the queue?" Uryuu's voice surprises her. She hadn't realized they were breathing into their mics.

"Oh yes. Sure. Sure. Please." Orihime drops the spoon into the tub of ice cream that lost its taste when she sunk into bitterness. She wonders if her discontentment is palpable. Can everyone see how unhappy she is with the state of her life?

She can't even name what she's enslaved to. It's merely this formless parasite of feelings. 

Is it systemic? Trauma? Compulsion?

"I'm glad you got home safe, Ishida. You looked the worst." Orihime attempts to soothe herself. Uryuu has always been a sensible person to her, always trying to be the voice of reason and what not. Even if he caves in. He is the most insightful. She always feels compelled to baby him and he never rejects her with this fake sense of machismo. Sweet talking to him, she can sweet talk herself out of a bad mood.

"I'm not good at that kinda stuff." Uryuu laughs forcibly enough for Orihime to notice. 

The queue pings for them to accept the match. 

"What do you mean that kinda stuff?" Orihime has a vague understanding. The 'fitting in' kind of stuff, but she doesn't know anybody who is good at that. Not even Ichigo. They are all isolated in some form of prescribed self absorption. 

"I don't think I like party drugs all that much." He confesses. 

"Then why do you do them?" Because she sure as hell doesn't participate. Even though it's out of some misguided fear—naiveté.

"Because it always looks like everyone is having so much fun. I wanna have fun too." Uryuu has picked up Ichigo and Keigo's lazy speech pattern. When she first met Uryuu he said words like _flummoxed_ or _garrulous_. 

"It doesn't matter if you're not having fun, Ishida. No one wants you to be miserable." Her voice shrinks. 

"I know. I'm sorry. I won't be a phony anymore." Uryuu hiccups into his mic.

"Good. No one wants you to be a phony."

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> still trying to work it out. im out of job right now lol. this just made me feel better to write. this story is in relation to the other ones ive attached to it. I just didn't wanna dump all my ideas into one huge fic. big, long fits make me anxious.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what the fuck this is. It's been sitting on my desktop for ages. I wanted to write about tiddies and sexual frustration is all.


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